


Déjà Vu

by morituritesalutant



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, Amnesia, Depression, Friends With Benefits To Lovers, Getting Back Together, Grieving, M/M, Magic Realism, POV Sam Wilson, Slight Gore (hearts are literally exchanged), Survivor Guilt, Vague mention of shady unexplained government organisation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-15
Updated: 2017-07-15
Packaged: 2018-12-02 14:13:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11511075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morituritesalutant/pseuds/morituritesalutant
Summary: Bucky and Sam have been dancing around each other for 6 years when Bucky disappears after one of his missions goes south, while he was working for a shady government organisation that Sam knows almost nothing about.Two years later Bucky returns to him an amnesiac and Sam tries to figure out if love is unconditional and what he should do with the two hearts beating in his chest.





	Déjà Vu

**Author's Note:**

> Get in the mood with some [music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtlgYxa6BMU).  
> 
> thank you to Jewel as always, for encouraging me to keep writing <3
> 
> This Sam is a Sam that isn’t quite like the one we know from TWS because he hasn’t sought help for his PTSD, depression and survivor guilt.  
>  I wanted to write an au based on un long dimanche de fiançailles, but because that would require me to have free time, I took some themes from the movie as a start. tbc ;)
> 
> Apologies for any spelling/grammar mistakes!

Sam wonders if Steve used to be the kind of kid that brought home stray animals. They don’t know each other well. Bound in similar pursuits and loyalty to the ones they love.

Steve probably was like that, much to his mother’s chagrin. 

Clawing cats and fearful dogs.

The one he has brought home today has wild tortured eyes that move constantly without peace. Like an animal hit and abused too many times that it doesn’t know to react in fear or defence.

The man that sits before them on the floor is pale and cold. The places he touches freeze and flowers of ice appear. Sam can understand why they call him the Ghost of Winter. The old-Bucky would have enjoyed such a dramatic nickname Sam thinks  bitterly.

He wonders what this man's mouth will taste like, rotten, or like it used to: of sundown and lingering light.

When his restless eyes crawl over Sam’s face, there is no recognition in them and both Sam’s hearts skip a beat.

Steve looks at him expectedly and Sam looks at no one.  
A triangle of nervous stares.  
Sam wants speak up, to thank Steve for bringing Bucky home, but the words are glued inside his mouth.   
Instead Sam tries to swallow the honey of letters down. It moves slowly down his throat until the words are apart of him again instead of in the world they belong to.

It is in that moment Sam learns that love is not unconditional and that Bucky won’t call him Bambi ever again and he won’t call Bucky Skittles in return. (That’s probably an improvement if you ask Nat.)

Sam sighs deeply and tries to breathe steadily. He takes his coat off carefully, purposely, and folds it over the chair.  
The first act in this different life: it must be executed to perfection.

He offers his hand to Bucky, who takes it cautiously, and hauls Bucky up from the ground. They stare at each other for longer than is socially acceptable, but who cares about the unwritten rules of human interaction when you've just been reunited after two years of separation.

“Sam,” he introduces himself and Bucky smiles, briefly like a dream, and something flickers and darkens again inside Sam, a lightbulb turned on and off.

* * *

 

When Bucky had left for his mission (truly his last one, he had promised for the 101th time) he had given Sam, as is tradition, two gifts.  
One as a parting present and one as a promise to return.

First he gave Sam his heart, ripped it straight out of his chest without hesitation.

The kind of impulsive and slightly gore-ish gesture that always marked Bucky’s romantic gestures.

“I’ll be fine,” Bucky had promised him, “I’m on Steve’s crew again.” 

Sam knew Steve vaguely back then. Met him a couple of times. He seemed like a good man and reminded Sam of Bucky in too many ways. They both shared the tendency to charge in and explain later.

Sam had joked that wasn’t very reassuring, while he should have known that nothing would stop Steve from bringing Bucky back. 

(He owes him an apology and a thanks.)

  
The second gift was a roll of  film .

“Don’t develop it until you need it the most.”

Sam started protesting that he should really not be put into a situation to make complicated decisions concerning his emotions and Bucky, but the other man had replied “you will know when”, with his stupid cocky grin and his beautiful eyes with too much faith in them.

Sam tried to be grumpy about it, but he knew that by the way Bucky was smirking at him, he wasn't doing a great job at hiding his own grin.

And so in his right hand Sam held Bucky’s beating heart and in his left he carried the second gift.  
Lady Justice weighing their worth.

Sam didn't know which one was the parting present and which was one the promise to return.

Sam didn’t give his heart away to Bucky. Perhaps he was being selfish, but his mama had always said to love himself above anyone else first. For a moment he had wished he wasn’t an only child, perhaps he would have been better at sharing.

Bucky had looked at him with what the Portuguese called _saudade_.

Instead he gave Bucky his dogtags, the ones that were melted together after Sam fell and Riley died, and a bible. His father’s.  
His two most prized possessions: perhaps somewhere inside him the universe told Sam that the gifts truly mattered this time. 

* * *

   
Before Bucky returned to him, Sam told himself he would know if Bucky had died. He ensured himself that the second heart would stop beating and his own would wither soon after.

He would walk down the street and think, if I reach the end without seeing a red car, Bucky is still alive. But moments before he reached the  crossing, a firetruck would race by. The sound or its appearance had made Sam’s hearts beat fast and erratic.   
Did it count as a car?

Another time he would think,  if my train ticket is checked before I arrive at my station, Bucky will be alive. And the moment the train conductor’s voice rang out asking for his ticket, was the second the train arrived and the doors opened.

But he would know, right? If Bucky remained alive.

* * *

 

They live together now, even though they hadn’t lived together before. 

Sure, Sam and Bucky spent mornings together after long nights with too much alcohol and not enough honesty, but then one of them would leave, making excuses and the other one would silently accept. 

Sam knew that they both wanted to stay, but he was too much of a coward to suggest it. And Bucky had been hesitant, nothing like his usual self, and didn't said anything either. Fidgeting around the  truth.

Perhaps that should have warned Sam how much it meant to Bucky. 

Receiving his heart as gift probably told him that too.

Even now Sam remains afraid, but at nights he longs to crawl next to Bucky in bed and wake up next to him in the morning, with sleepy eyes and limbs everywhere together.

Steve comes over often. He brings a certain kind of warmth and flirtatiousness that Sam appreciates. He helps Bucky too, they talk in soft voices to each other and they go running a lot.

There is an easiness with Steve that Bucky and Sam don’t share. Even after 8 years now, they continue their dance of unspoken desire to be together.

It’s been a few weeks since Bucky returned to Sam when Bucky asks,

“what did we mean to each other?”

It’s a good question and one he owes Bucky an answer to. Bucky is braver than he is, Sam believes, always was less guarded.

  
And Sam thinks, what did we?

We were friends that fucked each other and almost lovers. We were kindreds spirits in this goddamn lonely world.

But he says instead, "not enough.”

 

Bucky flinches. Even Steve looks hurt. Sometimes bad crawls inside Sam.

But honesty is a cruel mistress and Bucky asked him, the second day of his second life, never to lie to him.  
 

“Let’s go for a walk, Buck,” Steve says softly and they leave Sam alone with his heartache and his inability to forgive himself.

Sam wants to cry and he doesn’t know why.  
He should be happy, Bucky’s finally back, but somehow his brain doesn’t understand and has replaced another one of his ribs with a tombstone, next to Riley's and his father's. 

Sam thinks of the roll of undeveloped film. He has hidden it in a sock drawer that’s filled with old t-shirts. 

Shirts that have forgotten what it’s like to be worn and have become only drapes of textile, huddled protectively together around Bucky’s gift.

Sam’s pretty sure that the film is from Bucky’s old analogue camera, that he had bought on impulsive during his artsy period just around the time they met, 8 years ago. 

  
“When you need it most,” old-Bucky had warned him. 

In the months and days and hours Bucky had been gone, taken from him, Sam had often thought about putting his arm into the drawer to find that film.

Yet, he waited. And deep down he knew for what: news of Bucky’s death. For Sam knew that day would be the worst day of his life.

The all-familiar look of broken  desolation in Bucky’s snow-fogged eyes is enough to finally make the decision.

  
To have proof of their… _something_. To understand the old Bucky and what he was thinking when he left Sam, or better said, what he didn’t think about, why he never thought about any consequences. 

It isn’t Bucky’s fault of course, but Sam still curses Bucky's recklessness and fearlessness.

It takes Sam two days of hesitation and lots of googling to find a place where he can develop the film.

He takes the subway there, the small roll weighs heavy in his pocket. 

  
He looks on with weary eyes as they take it from him, pushes down the need to shout to be careful with it.

He’s allowed to pick the photos up the three days later. When the third day finally arrives, they give him 15 photos, 15 memories he never had. 

On the way home he sees nothing else. He looks at them and looks at them and looks at them and wishes no other gaze upon the gift old-Bucky has left for him.

When Sam comes home he crawls into the sock-drawer to the place where the film had waited for him and hides between the shirts that have forgotten they are clothing and he feels small. The textures caress him and sooth him and he cries for the first time.

* * *

Bucky’s hands have changed to most. The hands of the Bucky that has returned crawl like spiders over everything and Sam can’t stand it most of the time. He wants to grab those hands and hold them still. He wants to warm that skin so that instead of snow flowers they raise seeds from the earth in their backyard.

Although he has learned by then that love is not unconditional, Sam also learns while watching Bucky’s anxious hands that doesn't mean he doesn't care. He still cares, too much, about everything.

He’s less sad than before, but he remains so very lost. And he has become angry all the time as well. Living in a limbo that he has no control over. For it means that with Bucky being back, everything that was done to him, everything that Sam had thought he had lost, is real.

Sam’s angry with himself for that. He’s angry with himself for a lot, he’s not like Steve with the endless patience. People think because of his grins and kindness, he can just be trembled upon, but Sam cares too much about himself to let that happen. He knows his worth, but yet, he can't help himself and wonder i f it makes him a bad person: not being able to love someone like you used to.

He wishes they could be gentle again together.

When they came to tell him Bucky wouldn’t come back, that his mission had failed, they refused to give Sam more information. They told Sam to forget about it. In fact it would better if Sam forgot about everything all together.

But the sun will rise in the west on the day that someone tells Sam what to do.

And so he had searched. He searched and called and heckled. And every day for two years he was torn between thinking Bucky was dead, believing that Bucky was a prisoner somewhere thinking the world had forgotten him, or convinced that Bucky had just left him and was living somewhere peacefully without caring or ever thinking about Sam again.

He still thinks sometimes that it was perhaps selfish and cruel of him to not be able to decide which thought frightened him the most.

It took a year before he found something.  A _S.G. Rogers_ living in a sketchy part of Brooklyn that Sam believed was the name attached to Bucky’s commanding officer.

When Steve opened the door, face unreadable, Sam could not remember what he had wanted to say and could only whisper to him, “please, I need-- please help me find Bucky,” and Steve had let him in. It was the first interruption of the pattern of no answers since they told him to forget.

It took another year before ice-stars were formed on Sam’s floor.

* * *

 

Bucky’s working in the garden, shirtless.

Sam can't say he minds.  
He doesn't notice it immediately. Only when the sunlight reflects on them, he realises that Bucky still wears Sam’s dogtags. He wonders how it’s possible that Bucky lost everything, from his name to his memory, but those tags.

  
Sam stares at them for a long time, his eyes then move slowly from the chain to Bucky’s collarbones to the irregular scar on his chest. The place where he ripped his own heart out without thinking. 

When Bucky gave it to him, Sam hadn’t known where to keep his heart safe.

Nothing had seemed like the right place and he was afraid to let it out of his sight.  
So instead he had let them build in a tiny door next to his own heart and had placed Bucky’s next to it.   
The key to that door swings around his own neck.

 

“What you staring at?” Bucky asks. He's looking up from in between the beds of tulips, grinning. There’s a streak of dirt over his forehead.

“Nothing. Just thinking.” Sam replies, trying to sound nonchalant. Taking a sip from his cold lemonade.

“I  think you what you meant to say was 'I was ogling your gorgeous body, Bucky.'" 

“Nah, I really didn't. And even if I did: you just reminded me that on top of that beautiful torso of yours there's unfortunately an idiot attached."

 

“Tss, no need to let your own insecurities lose on me,” Bucky flexes his chest muscles, "not everyone can be both beautiful and smart as I am."

Sam laughs. The lemonade spills out of his glass.

He suddenly thinks of the first night they met. Bucky had done a similar thing, dancing shirtless at a sleezy gay bar in LA, flexing his muscles after he offered to buy Sam a drink.   
  
For the first time Sam doesn't wish to go back to that time.

He likes what they have.

“Tell me about it?” Bucky asks, his voice soft with no expectations, just curiosity. Sam's always loved how much Bucky sees and understands. 

Perhaps it’s his heart beating in Sam’s chest, but he knows Sam, even if he doesn’t remember anything.

“Let’s get inside,” Sam says and they walk back together slowly. Hands brushing on the way in. 

* * *

 

Bucky settles on their mustard coloured couch, while Sam gets old-Bucky's photos and finally tells their stories.

The first photo they look at together is a portrait of Sam. There's lipstick smeared across his cheek from Natasha’s drunken kisses, it had been at Clint's birthday party.

This Sam from 8 years ago looks bashfully into the camera. Even though he’s surrounded by people he has only eyes for Bucky and  Bucky’s eyes, through his camera, see only him. They had known each other for two heated weeks.

The second photo is a candid one of Bucky. Sam wonders who took it.  
It shows Bucky sitting on the same ratty couch they are sitting on now. His face is turned away, towards a book he’s holding up in his right hand. With his left hand he’s midway eating a mango. The juice is spilling over his hand, but he doesn’t seem to care.

The Bucky of now looks at it for a long time, before they move on.

Next is a set of images that clearly belong to each other.   
They are Bucky’s self portraits meant for Sam's eyes only.  
Bucky's squeezed on an old chair in Sam’s old studio. Light comes in from the roof windows.  
Knees against his chest, eyes closed. Vulnerable in every way of the word.  
  
The photos show him in different stages of undress, but all with an easiness and trust that one only reads about in books.  
Sam’s sure these were taken just before Bucky left for his last mission.  
The last of the set shows him naked, looking directly into the camera: nothing to hide. A love letter in color.

Sam’s favourite is a photo of Bucky holding a portrait of Sam.

He had painted it when they visited Sam’s maternal grandparents in North Carolina. He’s posing in the garden, surrounded by flowers, colours, and _l’heure bleu._

Bucky is warm against Sam's side as they go through the pictures together. His icy hands under Sam’s shirt against Sam’s tombstone ribs and he smells of earth and blackberries.

* * *

 

Things are better and worse.

Bucky continues to spend most of his nights pacing through the living room and the tiny kitchen, waking Sam up at the strangest hours.

But Sam does no longer what to start a shouting match until they’re both too tired to do anything but sleep.

Instead he dresses himself slowly, puts on the big Norwegian sweater Nat had given him for his 33t birthday and makes Bucky tea.  
  
They often go outside until Bucky’s panic reduces to nothing but a sigh.

“Do you remember,” Sam starts one nightly walk, but then stops immediately.   
In the four months Bucky’s been living with Sam he has not once asked Bucky for a memory.  
He regrets it immediately, but Bucky squeezes his hand softly.

Sam feels encouraged.

“Do you remember a bible? Small and black, pocket-size.”

Bucky looks surprised. “Yeah, I do, actually.”  
"But, I don't really remember where it went, where it is now."

Sam doesn't know what he expected as the answer and he doesn't know what to respond.   


“I'm pretty sure it saved my life, though. I can't really recall with the whole,-" Bucky waves his hand in the air, "memory-loss thing. But I think it blocked a shot to my heart, like straight out of movie, which kinda makes me hesitate if that really happened or if I made it up. But honestly would not be the weirdest thing that happened to me.”  
  
Sam wants to ask Bucky what's even weirder than that, but he can only laugh.  
  
Perhaps it’s the ridiculousness of a bible actually stopping a bullet, but Sam can't help but to think of every western and swashbuckling adventure movie where that trope has been used. Or perhaps it’s the relief that Sam’s family bible protected Bucky while his heart was guarded behind Sam’s ribcage.  
  
His uncontrolled laugh echoes into the night until it's silent again except for the cicadas that never shut up.  
  
“I want,” Sam starts again, whispering through his teeth, “I want this to be real.”  
After 8 years he finally admits it and his voice breaks before he can gather himself. “I want us to be real.”

“We will be,” Bucky says, his voice solemn and faraway. 

After all, if bibles stop bullets, miracles exist.

* * *

 

Sam joins Bucky on his daily farmer’s market visits. He enjoys strolling past the stalls. He enjoys the fake feeling of being normal and everything being okay.

He buys Bucky’s fruit and pastries that they eat on the way back, leaving a trail of crumbs for anyone who wants to follow.

They talk a lot, more than they used to when they had one heart each and were called Skittles and Bambi.

Bucky explains that for him every day has become a combination of _déjà vu_ and _jamais vu_. The continuous feeling that something is familiar while he has no memory of it and the knowledge that he should know something, but has forgotten.

Sam finally and truly begins to understand during their daily morning-walks that Bucky is unlikely to ever remember the person he was before.   
It doesn’t matter to Sam, because Sam loves him regardless.  
He loves the old Bucky and he loves this Bucky.  
Perhaps it’s not unconditional, but it’s without a doubt unlimited. They aren’t fine, but they are real.

When they arrive home, after their coats are carefully put away and their hands washed, Sam slowly opens the door in his chest and takes out Bucky’s heart.

“This belongs to you,” he says. 

Bucky looks at him fondly and takes his heart back carefully. 

“As does this,” Sam continues and hands Bucky the key to the door to his heart.

Bucky stands before him, in one hand the key and in the other his heart, weighing if they’re worthy.

He leans forward and Sam kisses him. Bucky’s mouth tastes like sunrise and daybreak.


End file.
